Could crime syndicates traffic in abortion?

If a ban happens, where would women look for abortion care?

(Ada Martin, who was charged in the 1940s in Chicago for running an abortion business)

I recently corresponded with Frederick Clarkson about the possibility of organized crime exploiting the banning of abortion. He suggested that I examine that more in my next book. I intend to do so, but I thought I’d offer some of my own analysis here of what that may look like based on my experience as a small town reporter covering the heroin epidemic. 

Most men and women may picture organized crime as someone from a Francis Ford Coppola movie–some young and handsome yet ruthless person who has charm and looks out for his people. But that isn’t what I experienced. For the most part, it was unhinged people cooking meth in small kitchens or slipping fentanyl instead of heroin to unsuspecting addicts that later were found in a morgue. 

That brings me to my next point. When people say “back alley,” they presume that it will mean a perforated uterus because that was what killed women before. But as the expectation of abortion now comes with a pill, that is where the death or illness would likely come were someone given something poisonous instead of something medically safe. 

Historically, crime syndicates did get involved in providing abortions to women who sought them. It was incredibly lucrative. In the 1940s, a woman named Ada Martin was charged with operating an abortion business illegally. A police officer killed her daughter after Martin said she would identify authorities involved in protecting her operation. Martin’s business had been operating for nearly 25 years before that, according to an article that ran in newspapers nationwide on Aug. 17, 1941 (it’s available in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on newspapers.com) 

Ruth Barnett, whom Rickie Solinger wrote about brilliantly, was a perfect example of how racketeers exploited the situation. She performed 40,000 abortions on the West Coast. Solinger goes into far more detail about her operation in her book, The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law. 

I have plenty of material on both of those cases. But as I said before, I don’t think future crime syndicates would manifest themselves in the same manner. There are other major concerns too. When I spoke to a member of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for a previous story, he told me that most dealers traffick in multiple products or drugs. And so a person who dealt heroin may also be the one providing an abortion pill. There’s a potential for an increase in addiction by empowering such people. 

Economically, this would also likely empower cartels that would smuggle in medication abortion and try to get it past authorities seeking to prevent women in their commonwealths or country from ending a pregnancy. 

This additionally would increase the chances of violence toward journalists who wrote on reproductive topics–potentially unearthing secretive details about dangerous people– and it would imperil activists pushing to legalize abortion once again as they would be seen as a threat to the bottom line of criminal enterprises. 

I’ll explore more of this in my next book.